More than a year ago, I visited my great-great-grandparents'
family cemetery plot in Cincinnati. I knew who would be buried there: besides my great-grandparents
H. A. and Frances Seeger and six of their children, there were
Frances' parents, Joseph and A. Marie Ladenkotter.

Clue No. 1I noted that a Joseph and a John Dierkes lived
in the Ladenkotter household in the 1850 and 1860 census. Besides
my great-great-grandmother Frances Ladenkotter (really Francisca), born in
1852, there was an Elizabeth Ladenkotter, born in 1846.

Lisa advises formulating a theory to explain a genealogical
problem. After comparing the Dierkes boys' birth years to those of
the Ladenkotter girls, I theorized that the boys were A. Marie's sons from a previous marriage. But they also could've been her much younger brothers, or nephews to her or Joseph Ladenkotter, or even nonrelatives.

My census searches for other Dierkes in Cincinnati turned up
lots of results. I gave up looking at them; there was no way to
tell if any of them were related to John and Joseph.

I found a household for a Joseph Dierkes, containing a male
aged 30-39 (that's Joseph) and a female age 30-39. A. Marie
was born in May 1812, according to her gravestone, so she would be
28 when the 1840 census was taken June 1. That and the faded
census return made this not a slam dunk.

The printed book from which the online index came gave the exact marriage date, May 4, 1845. If the Dierkes boys were A. Marie's sons from a previous
marriage, this marriage date would fall nicely into a gap between
the children's birth years.

Clue No. 4If Dierkes (or Dirkers) was Anna Maria's maiden name, the boys were probably her relatives, not sons.
I requested the marriage record from the church.

A volunteer sent me the information from the record
(the books are too old and fragile to copy)—the marriage place and
date, the priest's name, and the names of two witnesses, Herman
Henrik Meyer and Maria Hinken. No name other than Dirkers for the bride, although those
witnesses could be related.

Clue No. 5I felt stuck. There was more haphazard
searching. Then I found an entry for Anna Maria Ladenkötter
in HCGS online death
indexes from newspapers. I noticed a name several blank
columns away: Weyer. I held my breath and scrolled all the way up
the page. Yes, this was a maiden name column. I hadn't thought about a
death notice giving a maiden name.

The notice was from microfilmed German-language
newspapers. Through the HCGS website, I found a researcher
familiar with German and hired him to get a copy. Eight death notices (I got other
relatives' notices while I was at it) ended up
costing about $50, worth it for something that would've taken me all day and maybe then some. He could have translated
them, too, but I wanted to try it.

I'm still working on that, but it's easy to tell the notice gives the name as "Anna Maria
Ladenkötter geb. Weyer." Geb. is an abbreviation of the German word for "born."

Ancestor AnswersJohn and Joseph Dierkes are very likely Anna Maria Weyer's
sons from her first marriage. What would really clinch this—here's
where my strategy for turning
these online clues into ancestor answers comes in—is to find
her marriage record to Joseph Dierkes, death notices for Joseph
Dierkes (naming his survivors) or the boys (I have scoured
the HCGS index for these, to no avail), and/or baptismal records
for the Dierkes boys.

The 33rd annual IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy,
taking place Aug. 4-9 in Boston, will stream about 50 sessions
online in what's being called IAJGS Conference LIVE!
You can sign up to view sessions for a full day for $49, two days
for $98, or the whole week for $139. LIVE! viewers can ask questions
during the sessions via Twitter. Learn more on the IAJGS
Conference LIVE! website.

IAJGS is the International Association of Jewish Genealogical
Societies.

Royal genealogy has been a hot topic on the interwebs since
the birth of Prince George of Cambridge Monday bumped his Uncle
Prince Harry out of the No. 3 spot in the line
of successtion to the British throne. MyHeritage
has the Royal Family Tree here. I found the Modern View
easier to use; you can use the tabs at the bottom of the page to
toggle between this and the Classic View. Click on a person to
see details about him or her on the left.

Ancestry.com has updated its free Shoebox Mobile App
(for Android and iPhone), acquired along with 1000memories in
2012. The photo "scanning" app lets you take high-quality photos
of your family photos and documents, map their location, and
edit, date, and tag them. If you have an Ancestry Member Tree,
you can then upload the images to the profile of someone in your
tree. Learn more about
the app here.

Doesn't it seem sometimes like everyone else gets lucky in their
online genealogy searches, producing family tree revelations with
a few taps on the keyboard? While your searches turn up only the
400 other Michael Smiths in your ancestor's neighborhood?

We're presenting a special edition webinar that'll help you work
through web searches and small clues to put together answers about
your ancestor's life.

work around the shortcomings of internet research to follow
clues to your ancestor's identity

This 30-minute presentation is Tuesday, July 30, at 7 p.m. ET (6
p.m. CT, 5 p.m. MT, 4 p.m. PT). Your $29.99 registration includes
a PDF of the presentation slides and access to view the recorded
session as many times as you like (that goes even if you're
registered but you can't attend on Tuesday).

I'm not too cool to be excited about the royal baby. I'm not going to send a present or anything, but a healthy baby welcomed by the world is happy news for a change. And babies are
cute.

And I could be related to the son of the Duke and Duchess of
Cambridge. Well, OK, according to the genealogy research I've done so far, the odds I have royal roots are pretty slim.

You
might have better chances: More than 60 percent of Americans are
descended from royalty, according to Gary Boyd Roberts, author of The
Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants (Genealogical Publishing
Co).

Please note I'm not knocking plebian roots (that's what I have). I find all
types of family trees equally interesting, and very occasionally equally
boring.

So let's welcome His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge with
a short quiz about royal roots. Answers are below:

1. True or false: An ancestor with a title such as duke, earl or
baron means you come from royalty.

2. If you're American, your chances of finding a royal ancestor are
best if

a. You come from German stockb. Your ancestors were potato famine immigrantsc. You go back to New England Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers or
Tidewater planters

3. The British royal family adopted a fixed surname

a. by about 1400, same as most others families in Englandb. in 1917c. in 1952d. last year

4. Good resources for researching royal roots include (choose all
that apply)

a. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage (two volumes) edited by
Charles Mosley b. Ancestral
Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before
1700 by Frederick Lewis Weisc. Jones genealogy: a Welsh family with the ancestry, and some
of the descendants of Rev. Rowland Jones, first Pastor of Bruton
Parish, Virginia, connected by marriage with President George
Washington by Gustave Anjou

Answers1. False. The term “royalty” applies to the rulers
(kings, queens, princes, princesses) and their immediate families.
Nobles are the families of high and hereditary rank, often
descendants of kings' younger sons, but not always related by blood
to royalty. Moreover, being noble didn't necessarily mean you got a
title.

2. c. The immigrants who brought royal blood with them to the New
World were most likely Puritans settling in New England, Quakers
(often Welsh) in Pennsylvania, Scots in mid-Atlantic states, and
Anglican “cavaliers” to Tidewater Maryland, Virginia and South
Carolina. If you have a sizable number—50 to 100—of immigrant relatives in one or more of these areas, you “can expect to find a
royally descended forebear,” Boyd says.

3. b. 1917. Before then, members of the British royal family had no
surname, but only the name of the house or dynasty to which they
belonged. In 1917, WWI anti-German sentiment prompted George V, of
the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to adopt Windsor as his surname. “Windsor” came from the castle of that name. In 1952,
Elizabeth II’s surname and that of her descendants was modified to
Mountbatten-Windsor, adding her husband Prince Philip’s surname.

4. a and b. Avoid genealogies by Gustav Anjou (1863-1942), known for
falsifying the family histories he wrote for clients.

In the season
premiere on TLC, singer Kelly Clarkson traced her
third-great-grandfather Isaiah Rose from Marietta,
Ohio, to his imprisonment at the notorious
Andersonville Civil War prison, and back home after his escape. There,
he served as county sheriff and a state senator.

The
story is common: Lots of
Americans have Civil War soldier ancestors, many of whom were held
at Andersonville and other prisons. The genealogy research is very doable—and
you don’t have to drive around the country like Clarkson did, or meet with a slew of
Civil War experts.

It’s neat for "WDYTYA?" viewers to see the original historical
records, but the same records Clarkson used are available online or
by ordering from repositories. For example:

It's being replaced by NARA's Online Public
Access (OPA) search, which combines several searches from the website:
You can use OPA to identify holdings that relate to
your genealogical search and access digitized records. OPA also provides access to nearly a million electronic records
in the Electronic Records Archives, with more to be added. And it searches the websites of the National Archives and the
presidential libraries for web pages with terms related to your
search.

Your OPA search results are grouped into categories based on the type of
result:

Online Holdings: Search results including digital
copies of records.

Description Only: Descriptions of records NARA holds
that are related to your search terms. To see the actual record, you would need to request
copies from NARA, go there yourself, or hire a local researcher
to search for the record you need.

Authority Records: NARA's website describes these as
"Organization and Person authority records from the Organization
Authority File and Person Authority File in ARC. These contain
organizational histories and personal biographies." From what I
gather, authority sources are sources
(such as
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names) that were used
to index descriptions in ARC. The "organizational histories and
personal biographies" are in the sources themselves, not part of
OPA.

You could
search for a name, a research topic such as Civilian
Conservation Corps (maybe if your grandfather was a CCC worker) or a
record type you want to find out more about, such as War of 1812
Pensions.

I ran a search on a surname I'm searching, Seeger. My results included nine Online Holdings. One is a recent photo
including a person named Seeger, and two are digitized 1918 Alien
Application Permits for men named Seeger. Not my relatives, as far
as I can tell, but in case they could be yours: They lived in
Atchison, Kan., and it looks like they were born in Düsseldorf, Germany.

I also received 84 Description Only results, 13 results from
the Archives.gov website, 20 results from presidential library sites and five
authority records.

Thomas MacEntee of GeneaBloggers
and High-Definition Genealogy
has launched a new website, Hack
Genealogy. With the tagline, "Repurposing today's
technology for tomorrow's genealogy," it'll focus on emerging
technology inside and outside the genealogy industry, and how it
applied to your family history research.

The Civil War Trust has released a Civil War In4
video series to answer frequently asked questions about
the American Civil War in a modern, digestible format, and in
four minutes. So far, the series has 13 videos; watch them at civilwar.org/in4.

The General
Society of Mayflower Descendants has named its first ever
executive director, Walter Louis Powell. The appointment comes
after a yearlong search, and is part of a program to modernize
the 116-year-old organization. Powell has worked as an historic
preservation consultant, and as a visiting history instructor
and interim director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the
Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown,
WV.

You'll get place-based research guidance, resource listings and maps
for every US state, detailed county-level source information, help
with municipal records, and demos of strategies for finding Patriot
ancestors.

PERSI, aka the Periodical Source Index, may be about to go from
one of the best most-overlooked genealogy resources to one of the
best most-used.

Brightsolid, the British company behind findmypast.com and other
genealogy websites, has agreed with PERSI's creators
at the Allen
County (Ind.) Public Library (ACPL) to publish the index—and the company plans to make each index entry link to an image of the
article it refers to.

Let's back up for a minute and talk about PERSI: It's an index to
articles in thousands of genealogy and local history periodicals published in the US and Canada back to 1800. Any of which could contain information that
helps you with a family or place you're researching

The index was made searchable on
Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest Online (which has a more
recent version you can search at libraries that offer
HeritageQuest Online). You can run a search, and then if you
find an index entry that mentions a family or place of interest, you can order a copy
of the article from ACPL.

That's been the only way for you to access all those
genealogy periodicals. You know,
unless you want to subscribe to all of them, and then read them.
And then find the periodicals no longer in publication, and read
those, too.

Until now. If brightsolid can secure permission from publishers,
findmypast.com subscribers will be able to search for articles
related to their ancestors, and then link to digitized images of
the articles. That can't happen soon enough as far as I'm
concerned.